Abstract

An ultrasonic, synthetic aperture, endfire array has been constructed to study its time reversal properties. The endfire time‐reversal focal spot exhibits strong spatial sidelobes not present when focusing with a vertical array, but the temporal sidelobes for an endfire focal spot are as low as those obtained using a vertical array. The minimal hardware configuration of a synthetic endfire time‐reversal array using only one transmitter and one receiver makes communications a viable application. We have performed experiments to estimate data rates and corresponding bit error rates that could be achieved with such an inexpensive system utilizing either passive or active time‐reversal.